ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Target—the corporation—recently gave US$150,000 to a political organization to buy ads supporting the far-right Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate, Tom Emmer. Emmer is anti-gay and anti-worker. This has backfired for the massive retailer who has made serious bank on its carefully cultivated urbane image. MoveOn.org, another political organization of a decidedly left persuasion has produced an interesting video, “Target Ain’t People,” that’s representative of the backfire. While this isn’t up to the calibre of the antics of the Ken’s Kesey and Babbs, it’s a step in the right direction. Watch the video and if you’re so inclined, sign MoveOn.org’s petition. Here’s what I wrote: “Dear Greg Steinhafel, chief executive, Target Brands, Inc. Thanks so much for reinvigorating the corporate personhood issue. You’re just swell. Keep up the great work.” Jackie Crosby, writing for the Star Tribune, reports that three asset management firms—Calvert, Trillium, and Walden—have asked for a full assessment of Target’s political contributions. Crosby fails to provide full context: Calvert, Trillium, and Walden are all socially responsible asset management concerns, as pointed out by David Brauer, writing for MinnPost.com.

Maybe, just maybe, the US citizenry is starting to realize the stock market for what it is: A crap-shoot with house odds more favorable (to the house) than any casino. Graham Bowley, writing for the New York Times, reports that have withdrawn US$33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds since January. “At this stage in the economic cycle, US$10 to US$20 billion would normally be flowing into domestic equity funds,” Brian K. Reid, chief economist of the Investment Company Institute told Bowley.

Internet

Verizon has successfully conducted a field test of its FiOS fiber optic network, moving data from a single customer across its network at nearly 1Gb per second (that’s one gigabit). The customer saw throughput between 800-925Mb per second. But let’s see how it does with other traffic on the local node of the network. Verizon’s Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) is asymmetric, capable of 2.4Gbps downstream and 1.2Gbps upstream, but it’s a shared connection between local node subscribers.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held “The Future of the Internet” public hearings in Minneapolis on 19 August 2010. Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) was one of the featured speakers and demonstrated—yet again—that he’s as big of a policy wonk after election as he was before. Franken spoke eloquently (video; 13:15) about network neutrality, referring to the issue as “the First Amendment issue of our time.” Franken effectively tied the issue of media consolidation to net neutrality: “When the same company owns the programming and runs the pipes that brings us the programming, we have a problem.” As is plainly obvious, Franken, contrary to Ars Technica‘s bombastic headline, was anything but ballistic.

Media

Three of my heroes—Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Howard Rheingold—have dinner with their wives at Rheingold’s home. Part of the result is a brief video (video; 14:02) that’s as wonderful as it is remarkable. Here’s the first in a series of nine videos of Engelbart’s “Mother of all demos” that took place 9 December 1968 that Rheingold references. (Disclaimer: In the mid-1990s, Nelson and I talked about my writing his biography; I failed to find an interested publisher.)

Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman” looks like it will have as much, if not more, impact as his An Inconvenient Truth. The question remains: Will we, as a culture, pay attention this time. Face it folks, the US education system is horribly broken and it’s up to all of us to fix it.

Privacy

John Gruber concisely sums up Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, as Creep Executive Officer. Well done.

Publishing

Hal Espen, writing for the New York Times Book Review, starts “Beyond the Paper” reasonably enough, referring to the opening passage of John Updike’s Rabbit Redux as an “eerie prophecy of print journalism’s current disruptions.” And he waves his hands briefly about “independent websites and new online ventures are increasingly producing rigorous, original journalism.” But it’s all downhill from there as he opines his own self about the Washington Post‘s current wholly unnecessary exercise in drain circling under cover of reviewing sportswriter Dave Kidred’s Morning Miracle: Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life. Espen makes an unfortunate choice in focusing on Kidred’s “chronicle of how Dana Priest and Anne Hull meticulously pursue their investigation of the disgraceful treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, from the first nebulous lead to the final stages of nailing a multipart expose, is superb.” [Link added.] Except the Walter Reed story was broken by Mark Benjamin writing for Salon almost two years earlier. To date, the Dana Priest, Anne Hull, and the Washington Post have failed to credit the original source.

Virginia Heffernan writes in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that with the advent of the Google, fact-checking has become more akin to literary criticism. Web fact-checkers, Heffernan writes, “try to show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody.”

User experience

Oh, happy day. One year after the Typekit launch, Adobe brings a portion of its typeface library to the subscription-based type server for the web. The initial releases—including Adobe Garamond, Adobe Text, Cronos, Garamond Premier, Hypatia Sans, Minion, Myriad, Myriad Condensed, and Trajan among others—have been optimized and re-hinted for screen use. This, finally, marks the advent of real typography on the web. Seventeen years late, but better than never. Hopefully, Adobe will license its typefaces to Fontspring as well. I much prefer a one-time license to a subscription.

And the walls come tumbling down. Webtype launches from Font Bureau with 30 typefaces from Monotype including Gills Sans, Book Antiqua, News Gothic, Nimrod, Bell, Perpetua, Plantin, Rockwell, Sabon, Bookman, Century Gothic, Century Schoolbook, and Garamond. Next up: Getting Typekit and Webtype to work on iOS. Apple?

Vimeo has released what it’s calling a “universal player” for video on the web. The service will deliver what it thinks is the optimal player (Flash, HTML5, or native) based on the browser being used, the appropriate video definition (HD, SD, or mobile), and compression standard (H.264 or WebM). Google’s YouTube is apparently working on something similar with a new embed code style.

Erin Kissane is just finishing up her draft manuscript for The Elements of Content Strategy for Jeffrey Zeldman’s A Book Apart. Like Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers, it’ll be a shorty, probably less than 100 pages. And if it’s anything like HTML5 for Web Designers, it’ll be a keeper. I take issue with one of her propositions, though. “Just as porn built the internet, commerce has been the impetus behind the development of content strategy,” Kissane writes. Um, no, clear, effective, and efficient communication has been the impetus behind the development of content strategy. And as I’ve said repeatedly, content strategy is not a new area of practice, it’s merely a new label for something many of us have been practicing for a very long time.